Evergreen gPC2 TC2512 Reviewed - 5 out of 5

My firewall / router recently started having hardware issues causing it to lock up about every day or two and would take around 30 or 45 minutes to get it to boot properly; because of this, I decided it was finally time to replace it. I didn't want to spend a lot of money, and wanted something faster than my current firewall - this wasn't hard to achieve since at 800 MHz, even the cheapest computer on the market is going to be faster.

I ended up purchasing the gPC2 TC2512 from Evergreen on NewEgg. At $189.99, this was the cheapest computer they were selling. In fact, after pricing out parts, I determined that I could not build a computer of similar specs for that price. As it is running a VIA C7-D processor, it uses very little power and generates extremely low amounts of heat. This fact enables everything to stay cool without any case fans, and an minuscule processor fan; due to the lack of fans, I cannot even hear the computer running.

At 80 GB, there is ample hard drive space to install a caching proxy as well. This is something that I have been interested in for a while as I often hit the same (mostly static) pages for reference on various topics. It only comes equipped with 512 MB of RAM, however, this is still twice as much RAM as my previous router. Also, at $10 for 512 MB 533 DDR2, I doubled the amount of memory and still kept the computer at under $200 before shipping.

I promptly repartitioned the hard drive - wiping out gOS Linux - and installed Fedora 9. The process went smoothly and all hardware was detected immediately.

The only problems that I have found are very minor. Since the motherboard is so small, there are only two available card slots (both PCI). This was not an issue for me as I only needed to install a wired NIC and a wireless NIC; the motherboard already has one ethernet port on it. However, if you have more than one wired and one wireless internal network, you will either need to purchase a multi-port wired ethernet card, use a USB wireless card, or go buy a different computer.

If more hard drives were added, this system would also make a decent media server, file server, or backup server and, because of its lack of heat generation, can be stored pretty much anywhere.

Comcast's money-losing strategy

On my music discussion blog, I mention the problems of Comcast's new policy for music lovers; here I want to present a more general discussion of the issue. If you unfamiliar with this malfeasance, read Kim Peterson's article on MSN's moneyblog.

I knew that this policy was being discussed for the last couple of months, but apparently Comcast has, in fact, decided to move forward with it. First of all, according to the article, this will limit users to roughly 250 standard definition movies per month or 6000 songs per month. These may seem like huge numbers, but what if you watch a movie every night on Netflix, listen to a couple hours of music a night, download the lastest ISO files for your favorite Linux distribution, watch the news nightly, download updates for you operating system weekly, check your e-mail daily, surf the web for a couple hours every day, and play your favorite online game on the weekends? Taken by itself, 6000 songs or 250 movies may seem like a lot, but combine them and add all of the normal traffic that people use and is if feasible that many people will go over this limit. (ed. Comcast's faq lists 62500 songs, not the 6000 that I read elsewhere.)

So what can the average person do about this problem? For starters, I have contacted several of the DSL providers in my area for price comparisons. I would also recommend either e-mailing or calling Comcast to express your displeasure. Finally, it would not be a bad idea to contact your state and federal Senators and Representatives as this could be an attempt by Comcast to limit peoples' access to media other than that which is supplied by them.

If enough people leave for other services, it doesn't matter what kind of unethical, insane, or potentially illegal policies Comcast comes up with.

Wordpress and Google Webmaster Tools

My newest blog, which is a discussion of music related topics to accompany my album review site is run on WordPress's blogging software. All of my other blogs are hosted by Blogger, so this is a change for me. The biggest pitfall that I have encountered was with submitting my RSS feeds to Google's Webmaster tools in order to ensure that my new posts are added to their database in a timely manner.

Hopefully my experiences can save someone else from pulling their hair out. After submitting the posts feed and the comments feed, I received five errors for each: 1 "Invalid URL", 1 " Invalid XML: too many tags", and 3 "Invalid XML attribute" errors. Google's submission software does not support RSS 2, and, unfortunately, that is what the links at the bottom of WordPress generated blogs are (in the form of feed=rss2 and feed=feed=rss2). There is an extremely simple fix though.

I noticed that the links say rss2; there would be no need to explicitly state rss2 if they were not also creating an RSS 1 version. With this in mind, I just changed the links to feed=rss and feed=comments-rss and they miraculously worked. I did not see any documentation on this on either Google or WordPress's site; this has to be a common issue and I am surprised that no one has addressed this before.